Robotics technologies have seen great success in manufacturing, where
they can provide quality of workmanship and productivity superior to
human workers. They have extended our abilities to explore and
understand our world in ways once only dreamed of. Medical robotics and
information technologies share these motivations: higher quality in
surgical procedures; better, more complete, and more timely use of
medical data; and treatments and therapies that would otherwise not be
possible.

In the past decade, medical robotics at Carnegie Mellon has grown from a
single laboratory to one of the strongest academic research groups.
Borrowing from and building upon heritage technologies developed through
decades of robotics research in other application domains, new
approaches to diagnosis, surgery, patient care, rehabilitation and
assisted living are being developed and applied clinically. Our
research includes:

In this seminar, we will illustrate some of this exciting research
through a sequence of three short talks.

Speaker Biographies

Branislav Jaramaz (PhD, Civil Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, 1992) is a
Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute and Associate Director of
the Institute for Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery at the Western
Pennsylvania Hospital. His primary interests are in computational
biomechanics and computational geometry and applications in computer
assisted surgery, medical planning, simulation and analysis. His current
work in computer assisted surgery involves development of new image
guided surgical systems and applications. In the area of biomechanical
engineering and computational mechanics, his interests include
NURBS-based description of anatomical structures, simulation of joint
motion after total hip arthroplasty and development of robust methods
for patient-specific biomechanical models. In the area of computational
geometry, he is developing tools for automatic and semi-automatic
segmentation of medical images, 3D ultrasound, and deformable
registration of medical images.

Jonas August (PhD, Electrical Engineering, Yale University, 2001) is a
postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon. His
research interests are geometry and uncertainty in computer vision and
medical imaging, particularly for the sake of improving image quality.
He is interested in organizing images into discrete objects for which he
is applying the tools of Markov processes and random fields to derive
algorithms from first principles. Some of his earlier research built
models of the local geometry of curves that can in turn be used to
identify vascular structures even in low quality medical images. He is
currently exploring the use of probabilistic techniques for removing the
often catastrophic streaking artifacts in X-ray CT scans and parallel
techniques for tomography computation.

Kim Hebsgaard, M.D., is a Research Fellow in the University of
Pittsburgh's Department of Surgery and a Visiting Research Faculty
Member at the Robotics Institute.